[My-ci] My Research on Creative Industries

[Ned Rossiter]

[please excuse the excessive self-reference in this text - the  
occasion of this presentation demanded a genre of egoism]

‘My Research on Creative Industries’

Ned Rossiter, 2006

Cultural and media research on the creative industries has tended  
towards a policy orientation, and it needs to complemented with other  
methodologies, practices and fields of inquiry. Some are obvious,  
such as political economy, critiques of Intellectual Property Regimes  
(IPRs), the adoption of Creative Commons and the business  
implications of non-proprietary licenses. And some are less obvious,  
such as the question of network socialities, the virtuosity of the  
general intellect, the precarity of creative labour, and so forth. By  
undertaking transdisciplinary practice to investigate the material  
conditions of international creative industries, my own approach  
forges connections between these complementarities with the aim of  
organising new institutional forms of agency and sustainability for  
creative labour and life in an informational era of network cultures.  
The rest of my presentation details my key methodological and  
research vectors, each of which has been developed in the course of  
specific projects on and collaborative engagements with the creative  
industries.

It is perhaps necessary to make a distinction between the cultural  
industries and the creative industries. For the occasional observer,  
it seems as though the cultural industries kind of imperceptibly  
morphed into the creative industries at some stage during the late  
90s. But this shift, as indeed it was, is no accident. The rise of  
creative industries corresponds with two key moments, one to do with  
a Blair government policy intervention in 1998 and the other to do  
with the informatisation of social relations inaugurated by the WTO's  
TRIPS agreement of 1995. And both need to be understood in the  
historical context of the dotcom era – a period in which startups  
were the unsustainable virus and boosterism infiltrated any number of  
discourses and institutional practices.

The policy moment of the creative industries is a case in which a  
structural determination takes place in so far as much academic  
research and local government initiatives associated with the  
creative industries was, and still is, shaped by government policy  
directives. Within the institution of the university, creative  
industries are essentially a research perspective derived from  
government policy interventions reflecting a regulatory commitment  
that in many ways exceeds that of the cultural industries. Here we  
find yet another contradiction in the ideology of the neoliberal  
state, which purports to deregulate institutional impediments to  
global capital flows. Academic perspectives have only gradually and  
reluctantly, if at all, articulated their own critical creative  
industries idiom in response.[1]

As many of you know all too well, in 1998 and 2001 the Blair  
government's Department of Communications, Media and Sport (DCMS)  
produced the Task Force Mapping Documents that sought to aggregate 13  
otherwise distinct sectors such as media and advertising,  
architecture and design, music and entertainment, interactive video  
games, film and even the arts and crafts, which are part of what is  
also known as the heritage industries. This diverse field of  
practices was subsumed under the primary definition of the DCMS,  
which has since gone on to define how the creative industries have  
been adopted internationally by governments and policy researchers:  
the creative industries, according the DCMS, consists of 'the  
generation and exploitation of intellectual property'. The  
informational dimension of creative industries, and the move away  
from the cultural industries, is embodied in this definition –  
economic value in the creative industries is derived from the  
potential of exchange value in the form of intellectual property  
(patents, trademarks, copyrights). In other words, the creative  
industries are a brand economy. Even more so, the rise of creative  
industries has to be understood in conjunctural terms. Witness, for  
example, the rise of the information-form as the dominant commodity- 
form, which is also how the creative industries relates back to  
culture industries. The WTO's regulatory architecture for  
intellectual property is itself a consequence of this.

But there are some important aspects to the DCMS's definition that  
are too frequently and easily overlooked by most researchers, many of  
whom have been infected by the dotcom hype, and party like its still  
1999. The reasons for this have to do with the temporal rhythms of  
different institutions, and even though government and the university  
are firmly intermeshed in market economies, they nonetheless move at  
a speed slower than industry. And this means the crash of the NASDAQ  
in April 2000 might as well not have happened.

While it's healthy for social ecologies to maintain a diversity of  
temporal modes, it has nonetheless lead to a form of obscurantism in  
most research on the creative industries. Here, I am speaking of the  
invisible remainder that operates as the “constituent outside” of  
'the generation and exploitation of intellectual property'. In  
assuming a link between creativity and proprietarisation, the  
analytical and political oversight of most creative industries  
research is that it fails to acknowledge the fact that 'the  
generation and exploitation of intellectual property' is conditioned  
by the exploitation of labour-power.[2] For this reason, most of the  
empirical research on creative industries paraded by academics and  
policy-makers alike is not only deeply unimaginative, it also results  
in research that holds little correlation with the actually existing  
material conditions of the creative industries. And it's at this  
point that my own research on the creative industries takes off.

In studying the relations between labour-power and the creative  
industries my interest has been twofold: first, at a theoretical and  
political level, I have sought to invent concepts and methodologies  
that address the question of the organisation of labour-power within  
network societies and informational economies. Here, my research  
relates to and has been informed by what the political philosopher  
Paolo Virno calls 'the thorniest of problems: how to organize a  
plurality of "social individuals" that, at the moment, seems  
fragmented, constitutionally exposed to blackmail – in short,  
unorganizable?'[3] Out of an interest in new forms of agency in the  
creative industries, I have investigated the political concept of  
“organised networks”, which can be understood as emergent  
institutional forms whose mode of organising sociality is immanent to  
networked forms of communications media.[4]

Secondly, my research has investigated the double-edged sword of  
precarity within post-Fordist economies, of which the creative  
industries belong as a service economy modulated through  
informational relations.[5] The precarity of labour-power within the  
creative industries is double-edged in the sense that it enables the  
attractions of flexibility – the escape from the Fordist time of the  
factory and the firm – yet accompanying these relative freedoms is  
the dark side of what researchers such as Beck, Lash, Urry and Butler  
have variously called uncertainty, insecurity, risk and complexity.  
Such fields of inquiry resonate with the concept of organised  
networks, both of which are rarely addressed from within creative  
industries research but hold tremendous potential for the development  
of the kind of critical perspectives that I think are missing.

The conceptual and political themes of organised networks and  
precarity have thus shaped my research methodologies in studying the  
creative industries in a comparative international frame. Following  
my research on the creative industries in Australia from around  
2001-2004, over the past two years I have been formulating and  
conducting research on the creative industries in the Netherlands and  
China, with peripheral studies in the UK, Austria and Hong Kong. Over  
the next year I will extend this research to Finland, and later this  
year a conference I am convening with Dutch media theorist Geert  
Lovink and Sabine Niederer – ‘MySpace: Convention of International  
Creative Industries Researchers’ – will table commissioned reports by  
precarious researchers in Barcelona, Berlin and Vienna.[6]

My research on China's creative industries began in May last year,  
with follow-up research in September in Beijing, and again in January  
this year in Shanghai, Ningbo and Hangzhou. I am now focussing my  
attention on Beijing's creative industries where my particular  
interest is in the relation between property speculation and the  
capacity for artists to engage the creative industries as a discourse  
of legitimacy.[7] Here, one finds not only a political contest of  
urban space that is amplified as Beijing moves towards the 2008  
Olympics, but also the instantiation of a discourse war in which  
there is great potential for political leverage and organisation on  
the part of artists working in the Dashanzi Art District's 798 Space  
– a decommissioned military electronics factory situated near the  
airport expressway on the outskirts of the city. Real-estate  
speculation and expensive apartment development have exerted a  
shaping force in the past few years, with artists’ rents escalating  
along with threats of eviction and plans by the government and the  
landowner Seven-Star Group to demolish the factory site and establish  
a high-tech development zone.

My collaborative project is to organise a network of relations  
between artists at Dashanzi and Created in China Industrial Alliance  
(CCIA), the non-government organisation responsible for the cultural  
program of the 2008 Olympics.[8] There are mutual interests between  
these two actors that can be facilitated in such a manner that brings  
the situation of creative labour into the orbit of CCIA's efforts to  
orchestrate a cultural policy shift from “made in China” to “created  
in China”.[9] My expertise here is as an interlocutor and illustrates  
the reflexive approach I adopt to researching the creative industries.

This is further evidenced in my research on Amsterdam's creative  
industries, and I will now give a brief overview of the project I am  
doing with postgraduate design students at Sandberg Institute in  
Amsterdam. Here I am working with the renowned Dutch designer Mieke  
Gerritzen to introduce students to the politics of creative labour  
and the power of networks through the process of designing a counter-  
or experimental mapping project on Amsterdam’s creative industries.  
The production of this project is documented through a collaborative  
“creative-trash” blog, free newspaper, archive and content management  
system (CMS).[10]

Having identified the chief investigative parameters of my approach  
to creative industries research, I am currently articulating its main  
concepts across new registers and geographies. The Amsterdam project,  
for example, both builds on and complements previous research on  
China, but its focus lies less on the organisation of new alliances  
across institutional terrains than on the creation of outreach and  
research platforms to facilitate the communication and production of  
educational resources. This research is motivated in part by the  
disciplinary rigidity so often found in universities coupled with the  
ways in which the proprietarisation of knowledge functions to  
restrict access and stifle experimentation. that aims to both analyse  
and construct new institutions that better enable the possibility of  
sustainability and security in a global information environment that  
is defined by uncertainty. Establishing mechanisms that distribute  
education resources common to networks is of central importance.[11]

Like the research in Beijing, the design project in Amsterdam  
proceeds through a method of immanent critique of network cultures.  
This is an experimental methodology that I mobilise across all my  
research in which the time and space of research is inseparable from  
the labour and life of networks. At the theoretical level, immanent  
critique takes its primary lessons from Deleuze, Foucault and Adorno  
with important input from Canadian political economist and  
communications scholar Harold A. Innis.[12]

Immanent critique is method of post-negativity. It retains Adorno's  
insistence that contradictions and tensions operate as a constituent  
force within any idiom of expression and it recognises that sociality  
within network cultures and creative economies is configured not  
according to dualisms, but rather to patterns of distribution,  
rhythms of tension, transversal social relations, modulations of  
affect and transdisciplinary institutional practices. In this sense,  
immanent critique understands the antagonism of the constituent  
outside as a processual force of affirmation as distinct from the  
“negation of negation”. My position differs from Zizek on this point,  
who reads the Hegelian “negation of negation” as 'nothing but  
repetition at its purest: in the first move, a certain gesture is  
accomplished and fails; then, in the second move, this same gesture  
is simply repeated'.[13] Such a manoeuvre, I would argue, does not  
account for the indeterminacy of difference that attends the  
affirmative role of the constituent outside as it subsists within a  
network of networks.

You may at this stage wish to haul me up and say, 'Hey Ned, what's  
with the contradiction here by invoking Adorno, critic of the culture  
industries, while claiming they have been replaced by the creative  
industries'? I will just propose that the shift from cultural  
industries to creative industries is also figured in the move from  
negative dialectics to network socialities. Such is the passage from  
state regulated culture industries and broadcast media to creative  
production within informational economies and network media. In a  
more hesitant way, perhaps the remainder common to cultural  
industries and creative industries is the continuum of creativity as  
instrumental in the policy realm and autonomous in the realm of  
experience.

Finally, a few words by way of conclusion. While there is a  
distinctive homogeneity in the way creative industries travels  
internationally as a policy discourse, the material, economic and  
cultural diversity of neoliberal capitalism – its amenability and  
capacities for adaptation to national and city-state modulations –  
enables creative industry style developments to be translated in ways  
that seem improbable if analysis focuses exclusively at the level of  
policy reproduction. Such considerations reinforce the need to  
understand the variable and uneven dynamics of global capitalism,  
whose indices include the movement of cultural commodities, labour  
and ideas. The modern world-system of nation-states play a  
significant role here in regulating such mobility through the  
mechanisms of trade agreements, border controls and IPRs.

Here it is necessary to analyse the constitutive power of intra- 
regional, international macro-structural and trans-local micro- 
political forces. In other words, in order to make intelligible the  
patterns of global neoliberalism, one must attend critically to the  
peculiarities of sub-national scales (the micro dimension) and weigh  
these against international forces (the macro dimension). Only then  
does it become possible to assemble the complex relations that  
compose the shifting cartographies and life-worlds of neoliberal  
capitalism. My research projects on comparative creative industries  
in an international frame undertake this kind of work.


Acknowledgements

Thanks to Soenke Zehle and Brett Neilson for their critical input  
into this text. And thanks to John Hutnyk for his guidance along the  
way.


Notes

1. Obviously there are exceptions – here I am thinking of the  
important work by researchers such as Angela McRobbie and Rosalind  
Gill. See also the special issue on creative industries and cultural  
policy in the International Journal of Cultural Policy (11.1, 2005),  
edited by David Hesmondhalgh and Andy C. Pratt. Essays on creative  
industries in Mute Magazine's (February, 2005) special issue on  
precarity is a standout example of political critique, http:// 
www.metamute.org/?q=en/taxonomy/term/178.

2. See Ned Rossiter, ‘Report: Creative Labour and the Role of  
Intellectual Property’, Fibreculture Journal 1 (2005), http:// 
journal.fibreculture.org/issue1/issue1_rossiter.html

3. Branden W. Joseph and Paolo Virno, ‘Interview with Paolo Virno’,  
trans. Alessia Ricciardi, Grey Room 21 (Fall, 2005): 32, http:// 
mitpress.mit.edu/journals/pdf/GR21_026-037_Jospeph.pdf

4. See Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, ‘Dawn of the Organised  
Networks’, Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005), http://creativitrash.web- 
log.nl/

5. See also Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘From Precarity to  
Precarious and Back Again: Labour, Life and Unstable Networks’,  
Fibreculture Journal 5 (2005), http://journal.fibreculture.org/issue5/ 
neilson_rossiter.html

6. http://www.networkcultures.org/mycreativity/

7. See Ned Rossiter, ‘Creative Industries in Beijing: Initial  
Impression’, Inter-Activist Info Exchange (2005), http:// 
info.interactivist.net/article.pl? 
sid=05/10/09/139211&mode=nested&tid=22.

At the level of political tactics, language games and structural  
intervention, my argument here is similar to the one I make about  
NGOs and CSOs at the WSIS. See ‘WSIS and Organised Networks as New  
Civil Society Movements’, in Jan Servaes and Nico Carpentier (eds)  
Beyond the WSIS: Towards A Sustainable Agenda for the Future  
Information Society, Bristol: Intellect Books, 2006, pp. 97-116.  
Slightly longer version at: http://www.crsi.mq.edu.au/Mobile% 
20Boundaries%20Rigid%20Worlds/rossiter.pdf

8. http://www.ccia.net.cn/

9. See Michael Keane, ‘Brave New World: Understanding China’s  
Creative Vision’, International Journal of Cultural Policy 10.3  
(2004): 265-279.

10. http://creativitrash.web-log.nl/

11. See Ned Rossiter, ‘Organised Networks: Transdisciplinarity and  
New Institutional Forms’, Transform (2006), http:// 
transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/1144943951

12. Ned Rossiter, ‘Creative Industries, Comparative Media Theory and  
the Limits of Critique from Within’, Topia: A Canadian Journal of  
Cultural Studies 11 (Spring, 2004): 21-48.

13. Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Centre of  
Political Ontology, London: Verso, 1999, p. 74.